Tag: #Skills

One of the drastic but practical coaching skill is Challenging. And this is also quite helpful in the usual business conversations promoting the aggressive business execution. Challenging something to the coachees or members, it should be based on the definite belief of the unlimited potential of them. Besides, it may make them to find out their unconscious but extraordinary resources that have been equipped in their inside. Or, in some case, that could be the golden chance to him exceeding his own setting limitations. The effective and valid reaction with the certain Challenging of the members, usually show the dual aspects. One is the real surprising with the too much or too high target that have been requested, and the reaction could be “No, no, no, definitely impossible!” At the same time, he or she may feel some kind of happy feeling to understand the leader or coach believe their great possibilities. Then this intensive deal feeling will be the strong energy to evoke positive challenge exceeding his own setting then existing limitations.For example, the leader asks his member to say thanks to his supporting staffs 50 times a day. He may counter immediately “No, it’s impossible.” This kind of first “No” is a kind of the door opening with Challenging. And the starting point of the conversations can be setting the challenging but realistic goals. Then there are two essential key points here. One is the member should find the challenging and appropriate goals with his own honest feeling as his commitment. And second one is the importance of the leader’s participation finding out his challenging line that should be exceeded his own setting and safe zone. The fun of using Challenging skill is to discovere the unexperienced zone with the alliance between leader, coach and member, coachee.

The communication style in Japan, is typically high context and indirect. It means the Japanese people take care of relationship and harmony, so they often do not use straight and direct words. Although the Metaphor is a quite effective skill generally, it’s very powerful in these situations especially. The metaphor is a kind of the visual and real expression of the situations or experiences, not the description nor explanation by some words. Then, it’s rather effective sharing the real feeling or image of the experiences. Although the metaphor is quite useful and powerful skill, it should be trained in the usual conversations intentionally. Learning the impressive and easy understanding metaphor, practicing to get the words out again and again, creating their own metaphors of something like “chaotic work environment”, “brilliant success”, “disappointment” and so forth. And it is also quite important that if the metaphor does not hit to the coachee or the member, the coach or leader should not stick on to his own metaphor any more, and he has to try something else.